- AMD Athlon II X4 Affordable Quad-core Processors
AMD always come late to the show but when they arrive, they astonish others with their ultimate low price offerings compared to that of Intel. Their latest Athlon II X4 is the world’s first quad core CPU to be priced at less than $100. Their earlier quad core processors called Phenom II X4 processors were priced above $200. On the Intel’s part their Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme processors are always on the higher side of price range. This means that if you want the cheapest quad core processor you have to go with the AMD Athlon II X4 processors.
The new Athlon II X4 is, I believe, the smallest quad core X86 processor around. At 169 mm squared it is smaller than even the Core 2 Quad (2 x 107 mm square). This means that AMD can pack a lot more dies on a wafer with the Athlon II X4, and they can sell it at a far lower price than the 264 mm squared Phenom II. Excising the L3 cache also allows AMD a lot more leeway in the TDPs of these processors, and bins are likely not nearly as tight as what we may have seen with the Phenom II when it was originally released. The L3 cache eats a lot of power, and is a significant source of heat for these modern processors.
The new quad-core AMD Athlon II X4 processors performed very well, especially given their relatively low price points. Despite its lack of L3 cache, the new Propus core used in the Athlon II X4s perform extremely well compared to their full-fledged Deneb-based siblings. Comparatively, the new Athlon II X4 processors are also very competitive with Intel’s low-end quad-core offerings. However, gaming performance suffered due to the lack of L3 cache. Overall though, the Athlon II X4 processors are surprisingly good performers.
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